Between Remembrance and a New Beginning – the Groundbreaking of the Synagogue at Hohe Weide on November 9, 1958

Source Description

When the foundation stone of the new synagogue was laid on November 9, 1958, Hamburg’s
mayor, Max
Brauer, was present to give a speech. Hamburg’s first
synagogue of the postwar
period was built at Hohe Weide.
Previously the small Jewish
congregation had to hold prayer services in provisional prayer
halls. In his speech, which was about twelve minutes long, Max Brauer commemorated the
persecution and murder of Hamburg’s Jewish citizens during National Socialism and
honored the efforts made to rebuild Jewish life after 1945. His speech was broadcast on the radio on November 11, 1958 and is in the collection of the
NDR
sound archive
Tonarchiv. According to archive
records, the broadcast was produced by the editorial staff of the program
“Reportage.” The sound recording includes both Brauer’s speech, which is
interrupted by the reading of the founding charter, and a speech given by
Rabbi
Ludwig Salomonowicz. At the end of the
recording, the symbolic groundbreaking by spade and the blessing spoken by the
rabbi can be heard.

The groundbreaking – a solemn occasion

On November 9, 1958, representatives of the
Jewish community,
the Central Council of Jews in
GermanyZentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, Hamburg’s
city assembly, the regional church and various associations as well as the
interested public attended the groundbreaking for the synagogue at Hohe Weide on the
corner of Heymannstraße. The
Catholic auxiliary bishop was also present. The event,
which was covered by the media, took place twenty years after the November pogrom and thirteen years after a Jewish congregationhad again
been founded in Hamburg. It was one of a number of synagogue and prayer hall
openings in various Jewish communities occurring in the following two decades,
beginning with the consecration of a synagogue in Dresden in 1950.

The significance of the groundbreaking for the politics of remembrance

In his speech Mayor
Brauer emphasizes the
fact that the groundbreaking was not only an important event for the Jewish community, but that it
was also considered a ceremonial act (of remembrance) for the city of Hamburg. He goes even
further in his remarks when he states that “the most painful of all wounds […]
is beginning to heal” and that the city was restoring part
of its dignity with the erection of this building. Thus Brauer links his central
concern of rebuilding the city of Hamburg to the new
beginnings of Jewish life. He claims that all advances in the rebuilding of the
Jewish community’s
organizations had always been supported by the senate. He calls himself
"honor bound” to attend the groundbreaking, which he considered the “crowning
achievement of all the efforts to rebuild,” since the building of a synagogue
could be interpreted as a symbol of newly emerging Jewish life and a step
towards the “different Germany”Schöpferisch,
ungeduldig und kompromißlos. Bürgermeister a. D. Professor Dr. Herbert
Weichmann in ‚Die Welt‘ vom 5. Februar 1973, in: Max Brauer. 3. September
1887–2. Februar 1973. Meldungen, Reden, Nachrufe, publ. by Senat der Freien
und Hansestadt Hamburg, Senatskanzlei - Staatliche Pressestelle, Uelzen
1973, pp. 17–19, here: p. 17.Max Brauer envisioned.
While Brauer spoke as
the city’s
official representative, he also sought to demonstrate a personal connection to
his audience by repeatedly referring to his personal contacts with members of
the Jewish community and
mentioning his own experience of exile. Brauer also discussed the
development of the Jewish
congregation prior to 1958. In November 1948 he had attended a ceremony at the
provisional synagogue in the Jewish retirement home on Sedanstraße, and the
congregation’s
recognition as a statutory body occurred during his first term in office.

Rebuilding the Jewish
congregation

The beginning of construction on the new synagogue building did indeed signify an
important step for the Jewish
congregation that had been reestablished in 1945. Until then, they had provisionally used the prayer hall at the
residential home Oppenheimer Stift on Kielortallee or the
synagogue in the retirement home on Sedanstraße while
cultural events were held at the congregation’s facilities on Rothenbaumchaussee. Apart from not
having a house of prayer, religious life was also hindered by the fact that the
congregation did not
have their own rabbi for a long time – a situation that
only began to change after the groundbreaking: as of 1960
Hans Isaac Grünwald was in charge of the
congregations of Hamburg, Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein, and
in 1962 the congregation was able to
employ Dr. Nathan Peter
Levinson. He was also in charge of congregations in Schleswig-Holstein and
served as Chief Rabbi in Baden. At the
groundbreaking, Rabbi Ludwig Salomonowicz
opened the ceremony with his speech.

Future perspectives

In building a synagogue the congregation found its answer to the question of “to leave or to
stay,” ever-present in its early years: the building meant a (cautious)
commitment to a long-term future in Hamburg. 25 years
later, Werner
Nachmann, then chairman of the Central Council of Jews in
GermanyZentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, called the synagogues built in the postwar period a “daring
act.” “ein Wagnis”; Werner Nachmann,
quoted in Jüdische Gemeinde in Hamburg, Festschrift zum 25. Jahrestag der
Einweihung der Synagoge in Hamburg. 1960–1985, Hamburg 1985, p. 7.
Looking back, he interpreted the building of new synagogues as the expression of
a new era of Jewish life in the Federal Republic of
Germany.

The building of the synagogue also marked the beginning of a new phase for the
Jewish congregation in
Hamburg.
After its membership had decreased until the beginning of the 1950s, it began to grow in the
mid-1950s due to the
influx of people returning from the camps or exile and migrants from eastern Europe and
Iran. In his
speech Max Brauer
quoted the number of congregation members as 1,390. The restitution of the community
library, the opening of a retirement home and a youth
center, and the groundbreaking of a Jewish hospitalIsraelitisches Krankenhaus
constituted further important steps for the “rebuilding” and the new
organization of community life after 1945. However, the
community and its
life were barely noticed by Hamburg’s population, and the congregation itself kept a low
profile.

The synagogue building

The synagogue, designed by architects Wongel
& May (and built by a Jewish construction
company), was opened on September 4, 1960.
Max Brauer
attended this occasion as well. The synagogue, which had been financed by
compensation payments, provided the congregation not only with
appropriate facilities for their prayer services and religious celebrations, but
also with a mikveh and space for cultural events and youth work. The congregation had decided on a
rather inconspicuous architectural design; the building does not stand out in
the streetscape and opens up to the courtyard rather than to the street side.
This can be interpreted as an expression of the continued uncertainty regarding
the coexistence of Jews and non-Jews and the possibility of the congregation’s plans for the
future. Thus the experience of the immediate past is reflected in the
synagogue’s architecture.

Public remembrance

In the 1960s, a period marked
by successful rebuilding and economic recovery in Hamburg, public
remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust, which had still been present in the
1940s, hardly played a
role at all. Apart from the memorial stone for the Jewish victims of National Socialism and the
urn containing the ashes of victims from the Auschwitz concentration camp,
both at the Ohlsdorf
cemetery, there was no public remembrance – except for a
memorial day on November 9 held every five years. Up to this point, the memorial
located “out” at the Ohlsdorf
cemetery mentioned by Brauer was the only sign of
remembrance of Jewish victims visible in the public space. In picking this date
for the groundbreaking, the Jewish
congregation thus had not only chosen a symbolic day, they also
inscribed themselves into the locally established culture of remembrance, which
resulted in Brauer’s
feeling “honor bound” to attend. The Jewish community – or some of
its individual members – actively sought to shape the politics of remembrance
and to embed the commemoration of Jewish victims in the collective memory. For
example, the chairman of the Jewish congregation,
Harry Goldstein,
was strongly involved in the compilation of the first publication commemorating
Hamburg’s Jewish victims of National Socialism Hambuger Gedenkbuch für die
jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus published in 1965.

Hamburg’s
(Jewish) past

Remembrance and coming to terms with the National Socialist past are central
motifs in Brauer’s
remarks. At the same time, he links the fate of the Jewish minority to that of
the majority when he claims the destruction of the synagogues had also damaged
the churches: “what is done to one is also inflicted on the other.” He does not
name specific acts or perpetrators, instead adhering to the customary tone of
the time by speaking of “the years of terror and darkness” and a painful wound
that needed to heal. In contrast to this “demonizing interpretation”Peter Reichel, “Das Gedächtnis der Stadt,
Hamburg im Umgang mit seiner nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit. Zur
Einführung,” in Peter Reichel (ed.), Das Gedächtnis der Stadt. Hamburg im
Umgang mit seiner nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit, Schriftenreihe der
Hamburgischen Kulturstiftung 6, Hamburg 1997, p. 16. of the National
Socialist period, Erich
Lüth, then spokesman of the Hamburg senate, in a lecture
given to the Academy of the
Protestant ChurchEvangelische
Akademie in Loccum in 1957 emphasized the guilt the majority society had
brought upon itself: “We, the majority of the German Christians, humanists, and
democrats emasculated by a brutal minority did not stand up for our Jewish
brother, and only in hidden individual cases did we take care of persecuted
friends. The great revolt of heart and consciousness, the storm from the pulpits
did not take place despite some solitary acts of bravery.”“Deutschland und die Juden nach 1945,” lecture given by Erich
Lüth to the Evangelische Akademie in Loccum, September 19, 1957, publ. by
Aktion Friede mit Israel, Hamburg, n. d., p. 4.

In his speech Brauer
extensively discusses the time before 1933, which he
describes as a phase of “flourishing communit[ies],” choosing a similar phrasing
as the previous speaker, Salomonowicz. He
outlines the achievements of well-known male Jewish personalities in the fields
of politics, business, and scholarship such as Leo Lippmann, Max Warburg or Ernst Cassirer, whom he
honors as “respected and good citizens of our city.” Thus he
makes reference to the image of peaceful coexistence during the phase of the
Weimar Republic, and
he once again points out the good relations between the Jewish community and the
city. By
using the phrase “our city” he intentionally creates a community (of
remembrance) that is meant to keep the memory of the murder of Hamburg’s Jews alive
and prevent the suppression of past events by the majority society. In addition
to these prominent personalities, Brauer also commemorates the “simple citizens,” as he calls
them, and he remembers former Chief Rabbi
Joseph Carlebach,
another prominent figure in the Jewish community, as representative for Hamburg’s murdered
Jews.

Finally, Brauer
extends a greeting to the “saved ones,” thus also addressing Hamburg’s former Jewish
citizens now living in exile. In this context he refers to his own experience of
political exile and again to the contacts with Hamburg’s Jews he made
in several countries. An actual invitation to visit the city was not extended
to Hamburg’s
former Jewish inhabitants during Brauer’s tenure, however. A first tentative attempt at
establishing contact was not made until a few years later, when the Gedenkbuch was published (1965) and Herbert
Weichmann was mayor. A program inviting Jews
to visit their former hometown was not established until the early 1980s.

Official remarks containing personal memories

Max Brauer’s speech
reflects several themes typical of the remembrance culture of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Max Brauer’s personal
experience as a persecuted Social Democrat who had to leave his hometown in 1933 may have made him sensitive to certain issues. In
any case, on the occasion of the groundbreaking, they allowed him to repeatedly
refer to personal memories and experience and thus create a feeling of
connection. Overall his remarks adhere to the contemporary convention, however,
which can be summarized as “healing wounds – showing dignity,”Kirsten Heinsohn, “Wunden schließen. Das
jüdische Hamburg im Wiederaufbau,” in Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte
(ed.), 19 Tage Hamburg. Ereignisse und Entwicklungen der Stadtgeschichte
seit den fünfziger Jahren, Munich / Hamburg 2012, pp. 63–78, here: p.
76. and avoiding opening old wounds at all cost. Rather than naming
those responsible, he focused on a conciliatory perspective for a new future.
The occasion for this speech illustrates that 15 years after the founding of a
new Jewish congregation,
the synagogue set a mark – albeit an architecturally inconspicuous one – for
Jewish life in Hamburg.

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About the Author

Anna Menny, Dr. phil., born 1982, is research assistant at the Institute for the history of German Jews (IGdJ) and responsible for the coordination of the online source-edition "Key-documents on German-Jewish History". She studied history, poltical science and media culture at the University Hamburg and worked as research assistant in the project "Christians, Moors and Jews - commemorative culture and identity policy in the Iberian modern period" at the Department for Jewish History and Culture of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Her PhD is about "Spain and Sepharad. About the official treatment of Judaism during Francoism and democracy."

Recommended Citation and License Statement

Anna Menny, Between Remembrance and a New Beginning – the Groundbreaking of the Synagogue at Hohe Weide on November 9, 1958 (translated by Insa Kummer), in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, August 21, 2017.
<https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:article-188.en.v1> [February 22, 2019].

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.